In Hollywood last week, the skies darkened, the streams ran bitter and a green haze rose from the soil. Strange creatures slunk from the woods, their laughter borne on a foul-smelling wind, and danced horribly while the moon was gibbous.

And close to the hour of midnight, the wise men consulted their books, and asked what the meaning of these baleful signs could be. And then their eyes fell on the following words, scratched by ancient hands in a spidery script: “Michael Bay has used a metaphor.”

The new Transformers film, which contains robots that turn into dinosaurs and a weapon that makes people explode, freeze and burst into flames all at the same time, begins with something that is – and there is no other word for it – clever.

It’s a funny, throwaway sequence about the state of the movies, and it suggests that Bay, the director of four Transformers films, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, and a man credited more often with killing popular cinema than any other filmmaker working today, is ready to fight for his place in the pantheon.

Mark Wahlberg plays Cade Yeager – Cade Yeager! – a Texan inventor who’s always on the lookout for scrap he can refit and tart up. He goes into a derelict cinema (“Thanks for 79 great years!”, reads the marquee) and discovers a battered truck inside, caked in plaster, dusty but salvageable.

“The movies nowadays,” shrugs the theatre’s owner, who’s in his 70s – and, we soon learn, senile and incontinent. “Sequels and remakes, bunch of crap. I liked this one,” he adds, waving at a poster for Howard Hawks’ El Dorado – which is, as Bay well knows, itself a remake. But Cade sees potential in the wreckage, and spends his last few dollars on the truck – which turns out, of course, to be a Transformer, and their ticket to excitement and glamour. But when he drives it home, his 17-year-old daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) is dismayed. Cade says: “I’m asking you to look at the junk and see the treasure.”

Transformers: Age of Extinction is unabashed junk, but when historians dig it up it in hundreds of years, they’ll find much of value. Bay is openly positioning his film – his entire method and aesthetic, really – as the only hope for cinema’s survival in the era of the box-set and video-game.

In a sense, he’s right to do so: there are scenes in his latest film that simply can’t be understood, let alone enjoyed, on a screen less than 30 feet tall and without speakers on all sides, giving your eyeballs and eardrums an ecstatic pulverising.

But there’s a conversation with America’s movie culture going on here, too: most conspicuously with the Monument Valley of John Ford’s westerns, which Bay uses as a hideout for the heroic Autobots, but also with the open roads of Monte Hellman and Dennis Hopper, the fractured families of Steven Spielberg, and the golden plains of Terrence Malick, all of which appear – refitted and tarted up – in Bay’s movie.

Age of Extinction never comes close to touching those directors’ best work, and spends much time grubbing around many miles below their worst, but it’s at least goofily conscious of them, and brazen enough to identify itself as the next step.

There’s not much to report re: plot. A corrupt government agent (Kelsey Grammer) colludes with a technology mogul (Stanley Tucci) to build an army of controllable Transformers using a special space metal that’s truly and honestly called Transformium. A hitch: some lumps of leftover Decepticon are stirred into the mix, and the army turns sentient and evil.

In addition to the dinobots, another new type of Transformer emerges that can dissolve into a swarm of pixels and then glitchily resume physical form: a seriously impressive special effect. In the film’s third act, the story relocates to China – aka, Hollywood’s largest emerging market – where the Autobots and Decepticons do battle in Hong Kong.

Obviously, the move was commercially motivated, but it brings a new visual texture to the film, and the city’s ramshackle apartment blocks, with their air-conditioning units and corrugated-iron awnings jutting out at all angles, themselves look frozen mid-transformation.

The film’s problems are obvious and serious. At two hours and 45 minutes, it’s frantically overlong, with no comprehensible shape. The endless bad language wears on your ears. The combat is too bloodthirsty. Branding fills every visual gap. Bay takes an entire scene to explain, with references, why ogling his 17-year-old female lead character (the actress, Peltz, is 19) is acceptable under Texan law.

What’s more, many of the creative decisions defy logic. (A Transformer voiced byJohn Goodman has a robotic beard and smokes metal cigars.) For a truly praiseworthy blockbuster, see Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla – or better still, revisit Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, which remains the best thing to happen to giant robots since the Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.

But Transformers has ambition and attitude in its pores, and spectacle to spare. Bay shoots cars like they’re women, and people like they’re cars, and tosses around metal like it’s made from thin air. The film wasn’t meant to make you think, but it does. For better or worse, it’s cinema.